As cellular and other wireless communication devices have become more universal, the number of companies providing services and/or equipment to facilitate communications among such devices has also increased dramatically. Moreover, the services and rates offered by any one such provider are not always optimum for all users. Thus, it is important for users and hardware providers and activators to appropriately choose and reevaluate different carriers for each customer's situation. However, at present, it is difficult to accurately identify the carrier or rate center that is best suited for a given customer, given the wide variations in customer usage levels, lines and locations.
Existing carrier ordering and activation performance measurement tools typically result in a significant number of mistaken assignments, e.g., economically less than optimal assignments, causing the activating company to experience an excessive number of customer care calls to service subscribers requesting phone number changes. A root cause of this problem is that it is currently quite difficult for a provider to accurately assess local contractual carrier rate centers to be part of the provider's orderable carrier rate center inventory, or to detect a decrease in local performance or to identify a carrier rate center that is not performing correctly.
Although there are existing published ranking schemes such as AMERICAN ROAMER, it remains difficult to independently verify and error check the data presented by such schemes. Moreover, more efficient and accurate performance assessment would also assist in accurately identifying rate centers (Npa Nxx) that do not return local inventory, which identification would be useful in order to allow a provider to approach new carriers to help fill these non-local gaps with new local rate centers. The present inability to appropriately utilize this information leads to subscriber dissatisfaction and unnecessary customer care calls.